Opera Browser Company May Sell Itself Off

[haplo602]

Hmm... I thought they were doing well (ok at least well enough to stay afloat). As to the browser, after Opera 12 was EOLed, I did try the 15 and hated it. I am on Firefox now with a few extensions. It's usable but far from Opera 12. And I am hating FF more and more with each new release.

[Chewi]

Just to offset the negativity here, I'm a happy Opera "next" user. I stuck with 12 as long as I could but it was just unbearable after a while with more and more sites breaking and long pages (think large diffs on GitHub) practically grinding it to a halt. Yes, it's a lot like Chrome but I trust Opera more than Google and I just couldn't get comfortable with Chrome anyhow. I did try Vivaldi but it didn't seem ready yet. I'll wait and see what happens next.

[sarfarazahmad]

opera built amazing software. If only they had gone open source things might have been a lot different !

[FuturePilot]

So now when other browsers start dying off, Opera users can brag that "Opera Did it First!™"?

[Gannet]

Those bustards could release Presto to community under free license but they didn't. Fuck them.

[Licaon]

They kinda fixed a lot, now on 31/32 it's usable, with a couple of well placed extensions that is, but there are still issues and they know about them, the community in pretty strong (and this is the sad part), although as things work out now Vivaldi will get a jump in user base rather sooner than later.

[kurros]

I wonder how do they make money. How does browser make money. It was free wasn't it?

Despite the web browser being what most people associate with Opera Software--which does make a few pennies from search and such--most of their revenues are from their mobile ad platform and licensing fees for things like the app store for smart TVs.

[swoorup]

I wonder how do they make money. How does browser make money. It was free wasn't it?

[Aeder]

I liked Opera back in its Presto days, but after the switch to Blink the only reason to use their browser was if you didnt want to use Chrome. Even then, it lags behind Chrome when it comes to certain features.

If instead of chasing after Chrome, they had helped improve the Gecko engine, then maybe they wouldn't have become "yet another Blink/Webkit browser". Or maybe open sourcing Presto would have helped too.

[Mike Frett]

Honestly, I'd probably use Midori all the time if it didn't crash every stinkin' time I do anything. I like the simple stuff, remember when Firefox was simple? I'm referring Firefox 2x and IE4 days. Simple and Clean UI.